It talks about how ringtones are spreading, their quality, origins and all that.
Like Linus Torvalds, Vesa-Matti Paananen is Finnish and give the world
ringtones by realizing that Nokia's smart messaging for text will also work
with bits of music. He put his software "Harmonium" on the internet for
downloading and missed making a buck (or a billion). New players on the
block are Jamster, Xingtones etc. There are polyphonic and master tone
versions. Most good songs can not be transposed to these small bits.
If a song does sound good on a cell-phone, may be it has music hardy DNA, or
the song itself is just like a ringtone.

The following ringtone experience I had in Hyderabad in Dec 2005 is worth
mentioning: It was the HydStat meeting being held at International School
of Business. We were gathered in a big hall for the inauguration. As is
customary, all were asked to turn off their cellphones. To start with, we
all rose to maintain a minute's silence for the Tsunami victims. While
we were thus standing, from a lady's cell 'phone rang out "Saare jahan se
achchaa ...". It was rather ironical. You proudly use such a ringtone, but
do not follow standard courtesies :-(

Had the opportunity to interact with Prof. Madhav Deshpande who has been teaching
Sanskrit at U Mass for over 2 decades. He was in town to attend a workshop at UCLA.
He spoke about the nature of Sanskrit and other Indic languages. Being unbiased, he could
unashamedly give examples where Sanskrit has (had to as a matter of mixing) borrowed a word
here and another there from Prakrit. What I had not appreciated before was the regour of
Panini in not only defining the grammer but also an almost all-encompassing lexicon of
roots which spread out in making ever newer words.
He also talked about the atmosphere in Pune when Tilak was growing up, about Bhandarkar, and
Chattre (the Vishnu Sahasranaam anecdote) etc.
I am trying yet again to get into Sanskrit. There are some wonderful resources out there.
The best I think is the set of lessons from Wikner. The Monier-Willaims dictionary is also
available.

Here are some excerpts from
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/holo/ (with some of
the Physics omitted so that it is accesible to laypeople). I was moved
to bring it in following a discussion I had with dada recently.
He said he was planning to write something like "interview with
maayaawatI", maayaa being the Hindu term used to denounce the
reality of the world we live in. I commented that some new Physics
seems to be embracing what could be said to be the almost exact
opposite - that we in fact denote the "real" reality of a higher
dimensional space.
The Holographic Principle and M-theory

To them, I said,
the truth would be literally nothing
but the shadows of the images.
-Plato, The Republic (Book VII)

Holography Through the Ages

Plato, the great Greek philosopher, wrote a series
of `Dialogues' which summarized many of the things which
he had learned from his teacher, who was
the philosopher Socrates. One of the most famous of these
Dialogues is the `Allegory of the Cave'. In this allegory,
people are chained in a cave so that they can only see the
shadows which are cast on the walls of the cave by a fire.
To these people, the shadows represent the totality of their
existence - it is impossible for them to imagine a reality
which consists of anything other than the fuzzy shadows on
the wall.

However, some prisoners may escape from the cave; they may
go out into the light of the sun and behold true reality.
When they try to go back into the cave and tell the other
captives the truth, they are mocked as madmen.

Of course, to Plato this story was just meant to symbolize
mankind's struggle to reach enlightenment and understanding
through reasoning and open-mindedness. We are all
initially prisoners and the tangible world is our cave.
Just as some prisoners may escape out into the sun, so may
some people amass knowledge and ascend into the light of
true reality.

What is equally interesting is the literal
interpretation of Plato's tale: The idea that reality could
be represented completely as `shadows' on the walls.

The Holographic Principle and Modern Physics

In 1993 the famous Dutch theoretical physicist G. 't Hooft
put forward a bold proposal which is reminiscent
of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
(...)
All of the information contained in some region of space
can be represented as a `Hologram' - a theory which `lives'
on the boundary of that region. For example, if the region
of space in question is the DAMTP Tearoom, then the holographic
principle asserts that all of the physics which takes place
in the DAMTP Tearoom can be represented by a theory which
is defined on the walls of the Tearoom.
(...)
To many people, the Holographic Principle seems strange and counterintuitive:
How could all of the physics which takes place in a given room be equivalent to
some physics defined on the walls of the room? Could all of the information
contained in your body actually be represented by your `shadow'?
(...)
In fact, the way in which the Holographic Principle appears in M-theory
is much more subtle. In M-theory we are the shadows on the wall.
The `room' is some larger, five-dimensional spacetime and our four-dimensional
world is just the boundary of this larger space. If we try to move away from
the wall, we are moving into an extra dimension of space - a fifth dimension.
In fact, people have recently been trying to think of ways in which we might
actually experimentally `probe' this fifth dimension.
(...)

After years of not being able to, Jay and I made it to the JPL openhouse.
While its certainly great for non-astronomers, I did not find it very
impressive. Unfortunately there was a lot of propoganda, and
self-congratulating videos. While JPL has had a lot of success recently
with SIRTF and Galex developments, thanks to Bush they seem to have to keep
on harping about Mars, and nary a word about Hubble :-(
Did like the Robot building competiotion for schools.
The education center was okay too.
I guess what I had hoped more was a greater communication between the
public and JPL people, which was lacking.

Watched Peter Sellers' "The party". It is good, but wondered just like
in the Temple of doom, as to why so much fun at the expense of India
(or an Indian in this case).
Anu was quick to notice where the shoe-in-water scene in namakhalal came from.

Star Wars- Episode III "Revenge of the Sith" is set to release on Thursday.
Here is an excerpt from A O Scott's (NYT) preview:
"This is how liberty dies - to thunderous applause," Padmé observes as
senators, their fears and dreams of glory deftly manipulated by Palpatine,
vote to give him sweeping new powers. "Revenge of the Sith" is about how a
republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes
militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise
of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of
some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in
the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at
Obi-Wan, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy." Obi-Wan's response is likely
to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign:
"Only a Sith thinks in absolutes."

"Words Matter" was a discussion on scientific writing (3rd annual).
3 12-minute talks by Margaret Wertheim, Christof Koch, Leonard Mlodinow
followed by discussion. About targetting the audience, being accurate and
passionate, and
keeping one's audience and oneself in mind. Some interesting facts about who reads
science magazenes (87% male, ave. age 49) and how one can try to seep it in to
other periodicals so other people read it. Could not get to my question about
how to get at least part of superstition out of the system.

Stable grounds today. California starts predicting eartquakes - well, at least
the aftershock probabilitiess from any that occur. Yellow is warning, red is danger.
Blue is cool. While one need not look at it as one would the weather forecast, it
becomes a useful tool combined with a subscription to the mailing list that informs you
when an earthquake has occured. You can then go look at the hourly forecast for
possible aftershocks. The current system treats all earthquakes as the main one
and predicts smaller quakes based on that. Half the time, however, for the big quakes,
there have been smaller foreshocks. So the really nervous can extrapolate and
run (would you be livig in CA then, though?).

Am helping Jay and his team prepare for the County level Math field day.
Noticed that they spend a lot of time just doing multiplications and divisions.
So even though they may know how to solve a problem, they get slowed down.
Vedic Maths would be an ideal solution. Also, if they see something that seems
completely new, they fumble a bit. For that Polya comes to mind. trying to come
up with a ste of examples which use both, and won't overwhelm them.

Watched Devrai. Its a very good movie, bordering on a documentary, on schizophrenia.
Dr. Prakash Rajadhyaksha who watched it with us attested to the near accuracy with
which the happening would occur in a real case. I was surprized to learn that the
incidence rate (across all countries) is a high 1%, and typically gets into play after
15-17 years of age, is genetic and not curable (completely, presently).

Smithsonian and intelligent design: Smithsonian museum is set to host for private viewing
a movie about intelligent design. Their fossil records of course have always cried out
"evolution". The museum says screening need not mean endorsing. But the question that dogs
so many organizations on policies comes up here too: should they allow such a screening
just because they get 16K USD?

Returned from a short but enjoyable trip to Santa Barbara. The beaches were crowded and
we spent a good part away from them. The botanical garden is in a nice setting, and Figueroa
Mountain with its scattering of flowers just indicated how gorgeous it must have been but
a few weeks earlier. The Chumash Indian cave paintings were amazing and their colors made one
feel as if done were done this century rather than the 17th.